Tomas Isdal

I am currently a software engineer at Google where I work in the Cloud Platforms group.

In 2012 I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Washington where I was adviced by Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy. I enjoy designing, building, and deploying real and widely used systems. My thesis work focused on peer-to-peer systems, specifically protecting the privacy of peer-to-peer users while maintaining high performance.

Pre-Google projects

OneSwarm

OneSwarm is a P2P data sharing application that provides users with explicit control over their privacy. Data can be made public, it can be shared with specific friends for sharing with their friends, shared with some friends but not others, or shared anonymously.
The OneSwarm client is in active daily use by thousands of users. For more informantion, visit the OneSwarm homepage or
read the OneSwarm paper in SIGCOMM 2010.

Tubeify

Tubeify is a youtube / last.fm / billboard mashup I wrote "for fun" to test out Google AppEngine and some new features in HTML 5.
It is currently open to invited testers only, if you want an invitation code you can request Tubeify invitations here.
Tubeify has received quite a bit of press (a list of articles is availabe at the Tubeify press page).

Even older stuff

BitProbes
BitProbes is a system created to unobtrusively measure bandwidth capacity, latency, and topology information of Internet end-hosts. Read more at the BitProbes homepage

BitTyrantBitTyrant is a strategic BitTorrent client. By managing uplink resources more intelligently, BitTyrant is on average 70% faster for clients with a 1 megabit uplink capacity than the currently most popular BitTorrent client. Read more on http://bittyrant.cs.washington.edu.

"PlMan" or cPlaneThe cPlane or "PlMan" is an application designed to simplify the process of deploying and running experiements on hundreds of computers using the PlanetLab testbed.

iPlaneiPlane is a scalable service providing accurate predictions of Internet path performance between two arbitary IPs.

Other Projects

Wireless over sound
In my graduate network class project, we implemented a multi-hop ad hoc network that
used sound as the medium of communication. Using only commodity
microphones and speakers we achieved a maximum transfer rate of 128 bps. Though we suffered migraines
(due to the high pitched beeps which we used to encode bits), the
project was a resounding success (literally!). It was joint work with
John P. John and Tanya Bragin. The final report and source code is available for download.

PageRank(ing)
As a class assingment in CSE454 we used different techniques for ranking search engine results. I used the open source webcrawler nutch and implemented different ranking algorithms including TF/IDF for both pages and anchortext, proximity of search terms, and Pagerank as described by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page in 1999. The Pagerank source code and the other ranker implementations can be found here